The Time Machine

HG Wells's vision of the future was cataclysmic. After wars decimated life as he knew it, the world evolved into Planet Of The Apes, rather than Eden: The Return.

Cinematically he's a gift to the boys in Special Effects and a challenge to a director of imagination. The challenge is to make the characters believable. Simon Wells, great-grandson of the author, fails in this regard.

The absent-minded inventor, played as an American with what sounds like an English accent by the Australian actor, Guy Pearce, is too self-absorbed and wild-eyed. All you know about him is that he lives in New York at the turn of the century-before-last, has a Scots housekeeper (Phyllida Law), who maintains the nanny-knows-best approach, and a sensible friend, played by The Full Monty's Mark Addy, also pretending to be American, who seems too conventional to be associated with such an oddball.

The inventor's name is Alex and he has a fiancee who dies. He doesn't build the time machine specifically to go back to when she was still alive in order to tinker with destiny. He was secretly building it anyway behind a curtain in his study. Her death gives him the incentive to try harder. However, playing God in this way doesn't work and in despair he takes the machine centuries forward and discovers a city that has reverted to its primitive state, where scantily clad natives live in colonies high above the Hudson river to avoid attack from fierce underground creatures that resemble Archer from Small Soldiers, with scaly backbones.

Wells (S) does not emulate George Lucas. He has a painterly eye, as demonstrated in The Prince Of Egypt and Balto. The cane constructions on the cliff walls where the friendly natives live are beautifully realised and the man-eating monsters from beneath the earth are even more frightening than the vicious cave dwellers from Lord Of The Rings - this film also has a PG certificate, with Scare Warning.

Alex befriends Mara, played by black Irish songstress Samantha Mumba. She is his post-apocalyptic love interest - they get to hold hands - who sadly makes little impression. Mr Bad is played by Jeremy Irons, looking not unlike the albino rock musician Johnny Winter in a crustacean outfit on loan from Star Trek.

Alex remains the confused traveller throughout and Pearce cannot inject Personality Plus - it doesn't take. He's not wooden, he's rubber. He bounces along, waiting to be hit out of court.

At times, the effects are unexpected. At others, they are lovely to look at. Characterisation has been sacrificed for the sake of spectacle. The creatures are genuinely scary, but without them the film is a presentation of what life might be. Maybe. But not really.